


to have a home

by punkrockbadger



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Gen, Post - Deathly Hallows, Post-War
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-10-03
Updated: 2014-10-03
Packaged: 2018-02-19 16:35:59
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,723
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2395307
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/punkrockbadger/pseuds/punkrockbadger
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>From his penance, generations of warriors will arise, ones with worthy causes and true hearts, and perhaps not all of them will be born bearing the scars of his poison. Perhaps some of them will be free.</p><p>Freedom, he thinks, is something beyond his means, but maybe he will reach for it after all.</p>
            </blockquote>





	to have a home

**Author's Note:**

> This was written as a gift for a good friend, who asked me to write Draco, for once.

Draco is newly eighteen when his father, wild-eyed and raging, snarls at him from the center of the courtroom, where he is chained to a claw-footed chair. He calls him a disgrace to the line of Malfoy, and Draco cringes just slightly despite every cell in his body screaming at him not to react. His father looks older and sadder, the wrinkles on his face are deeper and the look in his eyes is unnerving in a way he remembers seeing on Aunt Bellatrix. This monster, Draco decides, is not his father, because his true father has been dead since the end of Draco’s fourth year.

The Lucius Malfoy he remembers would feed the peacocks with Draco sitting high on his shoulders, would call his son a king for no reason but love and would whisper endearments to Mother across the dinner table. A shell that looks like that man is chained to the chair, hissing and spitting and calling out the word “traitor” like it means anything coming from him, and the words bind themselves together and squeeze tight around Draco’s throat.

Draco laces his fingers through his mother’s and prays for a quick end to this misery, and his prayers are granted when Lucius Malfoy is carted off to Azkaban forever, with no chance of freedom. Mother squeezes back, albeit weakly, as the jailers drag her husband away, and Draco offers her some tarnished shard of a smile, dug out of a memory far too old to truly hold.

He will not become that, Draco decides at that moment, fully aware that he is free only due to a whim of Harry Potter’s.

He will _fix_ things.

From his penance, generations of warriors will arise, ones with worthy causes and true hearts, and perhaps not all of them will be born bearing the scars of his poison. Perhaps some of them will be free.

Freedom, he thinks, is something beyond his means, but maybe he will reach for it after all.

* * *

Draco spends the rest of the year arranging for the necessary papers for travel, quietly contacting Headmistress McGonagall for his exam scores to put at least a grain of truth in the forgeries, and opens a world map on his father’s desk, jabbing his wand at various cities before writing down every fifth chosen. He teaches himself three languages, how to cook and the basics of Muggle chemistry, the closest thing he can find to Potions in their world, because he has more or less been banned from Hogwarts by his last name.

Some days, when he is bored of his books, he allows himself to imagine a world in which he had not pushed all of Potter’s buttons, or had simply made less of an effort to get on Weasley’s nerves, or had been civil to Granger, and in all of these imagined worlds, he is happier than he is now. But it is not very hard to be happier than he is now, he muses, as he and his mother sit across from each other at the new dining table Draco had bought right after the war ended. It is only large enough for two people, maybe four at a stretch, and that is far preferable to the long, black monstrosity that Draco had cut apart and burned in his rage.

“I think I’ll travel.” He says, hesitantly, one day in late November. Neither he nor his mother buy calendars or subscribe to the newspaper, so the only way to truly know the date is to go into town, and that’s hardly an option. “Some time soon.”

“Travel?” Narcissa Malfoy asks, frowning slightly. “Draco…”

“I need to just… leave here awhile.” He says, wringing his hands below the table to keep such unsatisfactory displays of nervousness out of sight, and she nods. If anyone would understand him, she would. “See other things. Be other places.”

“I know.” She averts her eyes and Draco remembers that it has been almost six months since his father’s arrest and that his mother has not yet returned to what was once their bedroom. She sleeps, instead, in a guest bedroom opposite his. Perhaps she has felt like a glorified guest in this house all this time, he muses, and he is only realizing it now. “If I could, I would too.”

“Try talking to Aunt Andromeda?” He says, blinking in confusion as the words leave his mouth in a hurried string. “She’s alive. And far better than Aunt Bella, at any rate.”

“You remind me of Regulus, sometimes.” She says, smiling tiredly, and Draco remembers how many of the people that she has loved are dead, gone or worse. “In the best way possible.”

“As long as it’s good.” He says, chuckling softly, and she joins in on it, like it’s their secret. “Owl her. She’ll know you for who you are. It’s how sisters work.”

“You might have been better off with a sibling yourself.” She says, looking sorrowful for a second, before nodding.

It is snowing outside and Draco melts little pieces of chocolate when he makes his mother cocoa and she smiles, noting the personal touch. “The boys always did it this way. Sirius especially. That Lupin boy was permanently giving chocolate as presents and Sirius had no idea what to do with it until he realized that he could melt it into milk and drink it…”

He settles by his mother’s feet as she rocks back and forth in the chair, one hand clutching her mug as the other ruffles his hair, and listens to a story of people he has never known behaving like the children they never quite got to be.

* * *

He Apparates to a Muggle town three hours away and books a ticket for late December to the closest airport to the first city on the list he had made months earlier, deciding that Muggle air travel is a sufficiently rebellious effort.

His wand is tucked away in his pocket, only a small sweep of his hand away, but he ignores the way it vibrates in his pocket, wanting to be held and used and directed. That was what had gotten him here, embracing that call and following directions without thought, and that was a different Draco.

This Draco, the better Draco, would learn his way without magic first.

“One ticket, you said?” The attendant asks, blissfully ignorant of the thoughts roiling in Draco’s brain like a hurricane tearing apart the coastline.

“One ticket.” He says, and two weeks later, Draco turns up at a small airport with a small, black pull on he’d bought in town and magically expanded to fit his clothes, ticket clutched in his sweaty right hand.

When he gets on the plane, amid a steady line of other people, he feels like he is at peace for the first time since June four years ago, and he sleeps soundly for the first time since his father came home, preaching wildly of a Lord come to save them all.

* * *

Draco moves to a small town in Canada that he’d selected while half drunk, one night. He’d seen the name his finger landed on, Lockeport, and nearly giggled when he found that it was a fishing town. Hardly six hundred people, which meant that it would be easy to blend in. His father, who he’s started thinking of as Lucius (an equal) more and more often, would have had a heart attack if he knew his precious Draco was working on the docks, mingling with the Muggles as if he were one of them.

So he journeys down to the docks daily, makes his living by helping people haul fish on and off boats, and finds a new kind of joy in the monotonous nature of hard labor. His hands grow cracked from the harsh weather, thick calluses popping up on previously smooth, baby soft skin. Draco grins when he notices them, as if he is a child on Christmas, and laughs for the first time in months.

After four months, when the winter leaves, he packs his things into a suitcase, noting the fact that the flannel shirts, thick sweaters and beanies are hardly things he would have worn back home, and sets off for the next place. Draco will move, just as the stars do, until he finds the place he will shine the brightest.

“Only eight months more.” Draco says to himself, as he climbs onto the ferry, and, for once in his life, he is dreading going home.

* * *

In the third town, somewhere around mid-September, Draco nervously makes his way up to a small shop at the end of the main street, which advertises tattoo removal. He had nervously muttered his way through booking an appointment over the phone two weeks before, and found himself oddly motivated to get out of bed for once. The soul deep lethargy that’s hung over him like a personal rain cloud seems to be fading with each successive move, and he no longer feels like he’s running from anything.

“It’ll hurt.” The attendant says, before leading him into a back room, and a few weeks of similar appointments later, Draco smiles down at his finally bare forearm.

There is a scar in place of the grinning skull that had taunted him from the moment he’d agreed to get it, now, and he thinks he’d much rather have it than a tangible connection to what he used to be. He hardly remembers the scared, quivering little boy who only wanted his family safe in the daylight, returning to him only when the moon rose high in the sky and the stars hardly lit his room enough for him to see his fingers a foot from his face.

It feels like he’s cutting the last string to that boy now, telling him to do as he wishes while this new Draco that he’s become over the last year to move ahead. Things will be hard, yes, but haven’t they always been? Haven’t things always been a bit unfair? But it remains to him to fix them, now, rather than to leave the hero’s stories to others. He will be the hero, this time, and fix things.

“It’s perfect.” Draco whispers, feeling free for the first time in years, and finally books his flight home.


End file.
